LONDON ART DISPATCH MID -JULY 2025
This summer, London’s contemporary art scene is ablaze with ambitious exhibitions that interrogate our bonds with landscape, memory, and collective imagination. From speculative visions of nature’s alienation to abstraction’s quiet thresholds and radical experiments in art-making as social practice, these shows capture an era of searching, boundary-breaking creativity. Together, they affirm the city’s role as a crucible for aesthetic innovation and cultural reflection.
Alien Shores, White Cube Bermondsay
Artists: Etel Adnan, Alia Ahmad, Darren Almond, Harold Ancart, Michael Armitage, Milton Avery, and others
Gallery: White Cube Bermondsey
Dates: 9 July – 7 September 2025
Link: White Cube
Alien Shores gathers a remarkable constellation of artists to explore landscape as both metaphor and memory, offering visions that feel both uncanny and resonant. This expansive exhibition spans painting, sculpture, video, and photography to reimagine nature as a terrain shaped by cultural distance, technology, and longing. Whether evoking radioactive forests or impossible geographies, these works reframe the natural world as a mirror of human anxieties and aspirations. The exhibition’s title, borrowed from the Roman poet Petronius, underscores the idea that to venture into unfamiliar terrain is to expand one’s sense of self. From the luminous clarity of David Hockney’s landscapes to Anselm Kiefer’s monumental materiality, each artist contributes a perspective on how the land can embody personal, cultural, and ecological narratives. As climate crises deepen, Alien Shores feels urgent in its reminder that our disconnection from nature is recent, and perhaps reversible. In these imagined horizons, viewers may glimpse both the fragility of belonging and the persistence of hope.
As the earth trembles, Pippy Houldsworth Gallery
Artists: Alvaro Barrington, Julie Beaufils, Pam Evelyn, Jadé Fadojutimi, Sophia Loeb, Kylie Manning, Laura Owens, Emmi Whitehorse
Gallery: Pippy Houldsworth Gallery
Dates: 11 July – 29 August 2025
Link: Pippy Houldsworth Gallery
Staged as a vibrant dialogue between abstraction and process, As the earth trembles celebrates painting as both vessel and force. The exhibition draws its title from Adrienne Rich’s poem The Fact of a Doorframe, evoking the duality of fragility and resilience in creative expression. Eight artists from diverse backgrounds present works that blend natural pigments, instinctive mark-making, and materials such as burlap, yarn, and silkscreen. Alvaro Barrington’s compositions honour diasporic memory, while Jadé Fadojutimi’s layered canvases pulse with emotional intensity. Laura Owens and Kylie Manning expand the language of abstraction, merging installation and figuration to question the boundaries of perception. Emmi Whitehorse’s luminous paintings, inspired by the Navajo landscape, underscore the show’s meditation on interconnectedness. Across these canvases, abstraction becomes a threshold—a space where uncertainty and beauty coexist. In a time of social and ecological upheaval, As the earth trembles offers a moving testament to painting’s capacity to hold complexity and create new pathways of understanding.
Manifesto for Sustainable Experimentation, Beaconsfield
Artists: Sonia Boyce, Minna Haukka, A.L. Steiner, Trevor Mathison, Bruce Gilbert, Emily Mulenga, Ellis Parkinson, Luana Duvoisin Zanchi, and many others
Gallery: Beaconsfield Gallery Vauxhall
Dates: 21 May – 9 August 2025
Link: Beaconsfield Gallery
Marking three decades of fearless innovation, Manifesto for Sustainable Experimentation at Beaconsfield Gallery Vauxhall is part retrospective, part rallying cry. Curated by founders David Crawforth and Naomi Siderfin, this evolving exhibition reactivates past commissions while introducing new works, performances, and sonic interventions. Sonia Boyce’s reprint of her seminal 1995 piece They’re Almost Like Twins greets visitors on arrival, a reminder of the gallery’s legacy in amplifying underrepresented voices. Inside, Minna Haukka transforms archival research into live performance, while Dubmorphology infiltrates the architecture with covert recordings, rendering the building a sentient body. Younger artists like Emily Mulenga and Ellis Parkinson expand the dialogue with works exploring pop culture, colonial memory, and the politics of laughter. Beyond being a celebration, the exhibition positions Beaconsfield as a living laboratory where art’s social, environmental, and political potential is continually renegotiated. In a city defined by rapid change, Manifesto for Sustainable Experimentation affirms that experimentation itself can be an enduring form of resistance.
